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“... strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell the father of neo-conservatism. These intellectual claims to or attacks on ...”

“... mother’s rectitude and parsimony, she did contrive to make a ‘good’ marriage with Montagu Norman, the man who treated the Bank of England’s reserves as if they were his own, and his own as if they were the Bank of England’s. We are afforded the odd glimpse of this old fiscal reactionary, and of some other Thirties dinosaurs like Sir Samuel ...”

“... spoiled darling left behind in the Home Counties’. But his most furious barbs are reserved for Norman Podhoretz, the reactionary editor of Commentary. Hitchens seems almost obsessed by him, returning to the attack over and over again. It is a curious fact that Podhoretz, an immodest man who has much about which to ...”

“... a bestseller published to considerable critical acclaim, The Adventures of Augie March. Though Norman Podhoretz complained that it was marred by a ‘willed buoyancy’, it was extravagantly praised by more senior and noteworthy critics, including Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler. In the novel’s memorable first sentence, it is ...”

“... novel about the Allied occupation of Naples, which Heller admired. That gave him pause. Then Norman Mailer’s huge war novel, The Naked and the Dead, stopped him cold. Heller realised immediately that any war novel he was then likely to write would simply disappear in Mailer’s penumbra. Heller later told an interviewer that Mailer was an ...”

“... of prejudice and convention, or the merely fashionable attraction of the Left for figures like Norman Podhoretz, who turns out to be really interested simply in Making It) they are coming to the same conclusion from very different angles. Brightman, I think, is tacitly accusing her subject of being obsessed, a trifle perversely, with the ...”

“... a tinge of this in many of O’Brien’s essays. Thus there is a wonderfully funny demolition of Norman Podhoretz – occasioned by Podhoretz’s criticism of O’Brien’s book on Camus. An essay on the press has a long, rambling attack on an editorial from the Observer – without ever mentioning that O’Brien was ...”

“... our man is still scanning the horizon for nay-saying natives. To the not-entirely-lovely Norman Podhoretz, then editor of Commentary, who had presumably just asked Bellow for a piece: ‘And now tell me this: If you were described in someone’s magazine as a “burnt-out case” would you be at all inclined to contribute articles to that ...”

“... He signed up with the grandiosely titled Committee for the Free World, run by Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and then let his sponsorship lapse when the same outfit published hysterical slanders against Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. In the argument about standardised courses in ‘Western Civilisation’, he ...”

“... Leavisians: for example, Karl Miller in this country, Richard Poirier and (perhaps surprisingly) Norman Podhoretz in New York. They fanned out into their own careers, but most, even if alienated or excommunicated, freely allow that he made his mark on them. He had his own idols or heroes: Lawrence, increasingly, Eliot with all kinds of complicated ...”

“... a similar about-face in Paris. Then there are the many American intellectuals who followed Norman Podhoretz from the ranks of the liberal Left into reactionary self-bowdlerisation. For them American power is sacrosanct. In the 1960s V.S. Naipaul began, disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of ...”

“... East. In an observation which is on a par with his wife Midge Decter’s about Libya and the IRA, Norman Podhoretz complains about the ‘mindless bias’ of the press in favour of terrorists and Yasser Arafat. In fact, as everybody except Mr and Mrs Podhoretz knows, the American press has been biased in favour of ...”

“... increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of ...”

“... nothing succeeds, is also in a rather peculiar sense its own subject-matter. Back in 1967, when Norman Podhoretz wrote a book called Making it, it was said to be the then remaining object of prurient embarrassment, sex having ceased to be ‘what D.H. Lawrence once called it, “the dirty little secret” ’. ...”

“... the PLO. And in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, the American Jewish community underwent what Norman Podhoretz called a ‘complete Zionisation’. As Joshua Leifer argues in his new book, Tablets Shattered, the Jewish establishment became increasingly ‘particularist, their rhetoric blunter in its defence of Jewish self-interest’. That ...”